The Venezuela Coup’s Risky Dependence on Foreign Opinion

Both opposition leader Juan Guiadó and sitting president Nicolás Maduro are acting for an international audience.

May 1, 2019

The Hawthorne effect refers to
the tendency of individuals to behave differently when they know they’re being
observed. It’s on prominent display right now in Venezuela. On April 30, National Assembly speaker Juan Guaidó, after months of quixotic agitation involving
travel and interviews, took to the streets with a smattering of armed soldiers
to demand yet again that President Nicolás Maduro resign. The day quickly
dissolved into clashes between protesters and security forces, and currently
looks set to continue
at least another day.

There is much about the current
situation in Venezuela that future historians will have to piece together. One
major question is what exactly the United States, which has come out strongly
in favor of Guaidó, is doing behind the scenes to force Maduro’s ouster. Until
that part of the story is clear, any analysis will be incomplete. What is
obvious, however, is that the situation is not moving as quickly as Guaidó and
his boosters in the Trump administration and elsewhere assumed when the speaker
proclaimed
himself interim president in January. Contrary to Guaidó’s hopes, the military
has not abandoned Maduro en masse.
Direct international intervention also remains unlikely, with Washington
seemingly unwilling to commit troops and the neighboring Brazilian government,
despite its far-right inclinations, ruling out any participation in a military
campaign against Maduro’s self-styled socialist government. Guaidó has thus
been reduced to managing expectations and trying to maintain international
interest in Venezuela’s dire situation. The latter seems to be his only
plausible path to power.

The very fact that Maduro’s
regime did not immediately collapse when Guaidó anointed himself the country’s
legitimate ruler four months ago seemed to suck the air out of Venezuela as a global
front-page story. The country’s economic situation—food and medication
shortages, power
outages, and other infrastructure problems going back over a year—remains critical,
but without consistent momentum on the part of those pushing against Maduro,
Venezuela has, until Tuesday’s dramatic showdown, largely receded from the
forefront of public debate around the world. For Guaidó, a lack of international
attention almost certainly spells defeat. On his own, with the military
remaining loyal to the established regime, he has vanishingly few options.

As historian Alejandro Velasco tweeted
on Tuesday morning, therefore, Guaidó’s latest gambit “is not actually
about instigating a military uprising, but about forcing Maduro to arrest him,
generating new scenarios in terms of international pressure.” On Tuesday
morning, Guaidó headed to La Carlota air base in Caracas alongside former
opposition leader Leopoldo López, who has been under house
arrest for two years (Maduro has called López a “fascist
murderer”). López was apparently released from his confinement by
dissident authorities. Together, with apparent support from a handful of
soldiers, the two men urged people to take to the streets against Maduro. Respected
Venezuelan journalist Luz Mely Reyes wrote on Twitter Tuesday that her sources suggested
the uprising had actually been planned for a later date and counted on more
substantial military support; Guaidó, however, got word that he would be
arrested imminently and thus acted ahead of schedule. Tuesday’s demonstrations,
despite the initial surprise of seeing a handful of military members at
Guaidó’s side as he seized a Caracas air force base, ultimately fizzled—though
at the cost of dozens of injuries.

Guaidó does not seem to be
shifting public opinion within Venezuela in any meaningful way. Yet, by playing
to audiences beyond his country’s borders and personalizing the stakes of the
power struggle in Venezuela, he continues to enjoy the support of foreign
governments. That those foreign governments might bring their force to bear
against the regime, an unlikely prospect in the short term, remains Guaidó’s
only real chance at the presidency. This explains his desperate attempts to
keep alive the flame of foreign investment in his personal crusade. In other
words, the abiding knowledge that he is being watched by anti-Maduro forces the
world over is almost certainly driving Guaidó’s actions as much as events on
the ground in his home country.

That’s not to say that these
calculations are as simple as they might first appear. How many times can
Guaidó fail to wrest control from Maduro before his grandiose stunts begin to
lose their salience? If Guaidó continues to fall short of his ultimate
objective, will the attention and support of international observers, to say
nothing of foreign governments, begin to slip away? The realization that time
is not necessarily on his side, and that he may not be the only one seeking to
claim the mantle of opposition
leader, if López’s resurgence is any indication, is almost certainly
driving Guaidó’s risky strategy of employing public spectacle as a means of
stimulating regime change.

Maduro, of course, is also
attuned to foreign scrutiny of his government, even if he is less dependent on
the goodwill of Trump, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and French
president Emanuel Macron than Guaidó is. (Maduro cares much more about the
opinions of Moscow, Beijing, and, to a lesser extent, Havana.) To hear U.S.
officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House national
security adviser John Bolton tell
it, Maduro was ready to flee to Cuba on Tuesday and hand power to Guaidó,
stopping only because Russia “indicated he should stay,” in Pompeo’s words. Whether
or not this particularly extreme example of external pressure is true—Pompeo
declined to offer supporting evidence—there is a reason the regime has not
arrested Guaidó: Doing so might provide a pretext for drastic action from
abroad.

While Maduro remains in control,
the political situation in his country is clearly unsettled, with political
actors calibrating their performances to meet foreign expectations rather than
the immediate needs of ordinary Venezuelans. Whether that would change under
Guaidó is, at present, anyone’s guess. But for now, a crisis with profound
effects on millions of Venezuelans is being propelled in no small part by foreign,
rather than domestic, opinion.

Andre Pagliarini is a visiting assistant professor of modern Latin American history at Brown University. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on twentieth-century Brazilian nationalism.